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Boulder NOAA scientist: Night imagery shows lively planet

Ball satellite instrument shows 'night is not as dark as we thought'

By Charlie Brennan Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
12/05/2012 05:09:42 PM MST

Updated:
12/05/2012 07:23:05 PM MST

Unprecedented high-resolution imagery of the Earth at night was unveiled Wednesday by a research group which includes a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a key member.

The images, powerful and detailed enough to show the lights of fishing boats at sea or even a single streetlight, were displayed at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The snapshots of the Earth at night were constructed from cloud-free images collected from April through October by the new NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite, which utilizes an on-board instrument called the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite.

The satellite carrying the VIIRS instrument also has Boulder ties, having been manufactured by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

"Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights," said NOAA researcher Chris Elvidge. "Even after 20 years, I'm always amazed at what city light images show us about human activity."

It is not just the big cities' bright lights that provide information about a planet that, however deep the night, is never truly and completely dark.

Elvidge said, "There are places that there are no people living, but there is still light." He cited sources of illumination such as flaring by natural gas and or the flames of wildfires.

In a live-streamed news briefing from the conference site in San Francisco, researchers demonstrated how the interruption and subsequent recovery of the power grid in northern New Jersey, Manhattan and Long Island could be tracked in the hours and days following Hurricane Sandy's Oct. 29 landfall.

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"It's truly a paradigm shift in technology and capability. This is not your father's low-light sensor," said Steve Wilson, a researcher in NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University. Wilson and Elvidge both participated in the San Francisco briefing.

"The night is not as dark as we thought," Wilson said. "We've only scratched the surface of the capabilities of this sensor."

The potential applications of the nighttime lights imaging are many. Meteorology is just one of them.

"NOAA's National Weather Service is continuing to explore the use of the day-night band," said Mitch Goldberg, program scientist for NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System, according to a NOAA news release.

"The very high resolution from VIIRS data will take weather forecasting events at night to a much higher level."

Elvidge said at Wednesday's briefing, "There are several teams around the world that have used nighttime lights to look for correlation between lighting levels and disease incidence." He cited a University of Connecticut study examining the potential correlation between intense lighting and breast cancer.

"I think there will indeed be many new applications" of the technology, Miller added. "That's what makes this so exciting."

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